Time is Now

Rising with the sun lends strength to our efforts. Wrestling our minds out of the darkness and into the dawn of consciousness, with less fear to plague our thoughts. Having risen with the sun, our efforts for the day are blessed, for they accompany the cycle of the celestial beings, following in their timeless way. Night blankets our worlds after the sun sinks beyond the mountain tops, and lays our efforts to rest. Our hearts become quiet, although questions may linger. The time for doubt and seeking begins.

The night carried me into the morning. The moon shone with light of our Star, who beckoned from beyond the sea. Inch by inch, our Star cast its light across the sky, across the fish and their hunters, the mountains and their lunar queen. Cavalries of cloud advanced from up over the mountain range, gray and gloomy from their travels. Kissed by the light, their edges softened and brightened, blue giving way to green, and then to gold. The sea waited patiently. In an instant, the sky flashed. The deep. inky black was now cerulean blue. Another flash. Cerulean to turquoise. What power, our Star has, to transform the wide sea with just a bat of an eye. The night carried me into the morning as a guest in the Court of  the Abundance. from 10 May, 2020

One of the fundamental organizing principles of our human lives, breathing, offers us in two basic types of experience. We can breathe passively, or without thinking. The body does its thing. The mind does its own thing.  We can breathe consciously. When we do, we experience the bridge between the body and the mind. Breathing passively keeps things moving, and allows the mind and our emotions to race ahead. Breathing consciously keeps things balanced, and acknowledges that the present moment reigns. Breathing passively makes space for the mind to fill itself. Breathing consciously makes space for the mind to empty and acknowledge the fullness of existence. After coming to first consciousness, at whatever hour, breathing passively is the habit that allows the mind to race ahead. The mind becomes louder and louder. But, breathing consciously allows us to expand that first moment, and become sensitive to the seed of today's Truth-feelings.  How quiet they can

The world beyond the walls has already begun, although quieter than even before, what with the holiday now. While rays of light come through the screen door and transmute patience into rays of hope in my breast, the heavy stench of darkness snaps away at it. The heart that beats within me aches for communion, while the mind at work above me spins thoughts like silk that coil around my neck. At once, muscles in the back of my neck draw the face upwards towards the mountain's upper edges. Lungs pull in air. Eyes bulge, escaping their bone caves. For a moment, the awareness of what lay beyond the haze opens up. It smells like lingering spiced burned in irreverent prayer, and feels like cool sea air through the hairs on my skin. Here I am. from 5 April, 2020

Dreams a house where young, avid youth live next door, a house where my step-mother and father live a neighborhood with so much space, air, that kids cannot help but create adventures an accident in a garbage disposal room biking so hard that my pelvis feels like an engine time ticking a costume party, the last one of summer an electromagnetic field that possesses the body of an evil, black bird a holding pen room the escape of the children: the glass room next door, the sewer tools a trick of the imagination: changing allegiances, forgotten lunch on a typical, special day from 15 April, 2020

The air in my new bedroom is cold, where a mixture of musk, sulfur, and incense hang. I sit still. The muscles in my legs throb, having hauled this body up the hill not two hours ago. Quiet reigns. And yet, it is not calm. Like the inside of a woman’s belly before her contractions, life shifts and fidgets. Restless. In this room, my active mind has already begun to shed the attachments that it clung to since I crash landed in Japan. The charm of a park next door w here I seldom went, then-bathed in sakura petals that now have all but gone, has passed. The mystery that I felt lingering farther north, out by the bay, has not. The spooky chill of black sea will beckon my restlessness again. Home is where the heart is, they say. Home is also where you lay your head, they also say. (Maybe different people.) In that apartment in Oita City, though, my head has not laid there for nearly two months. My heart has already relinquished it. As wisps of smoke dance above me, carried by streams